Unified Customer Experience Through Effective Product Design Guideline

Unified Customer Experience (UCX) is an integrated and comprehensive approach to managing customer interactions and engagements across all channels and touchpoints.

UCX aims to create a seamless, consistent, and cohesive customer journey, ensuring that every interaction with a brand—whether online, offline, through customer service, or in-store—delivers a uniform level of service, messaging, and experience. 

Nowadays, customers expect personalized, efficient, and consistent interactions regardless of how they engage with a brand. UCX ensures that brand messages are consistently communicated, strengthening brand identity and trust. In contrast, traditional customer experience management often operates separately across departments, leading to inconsistent customer experiences. A unified approach eliminates these inconsistencies by harmonizing the experience across all channels, creating a more satisfying customer journey. 

Beyond how your website appears or how you engage with customers, UCX also includes the design of your product. A Product Design Guideline is essential for maintaining a UCX, ensuring ambitious standards of quality and consistency across all customer interactions. It enhances quality assurance by fostering better collaboration among cross-functional teams through a common reference point. Roope Eskola, DSc Mechanical Engineer, R&D Director at Andritz (former Head of R&D at Raute Corporation), emphasizes the goal of establishing a comprehensive process framework rather than assembling individual parts.

Rather than simply assembling individual parts of the process somewhere, the aim is to establish a comprehensive process framework.

– Roope Eskola, DSc Mechanical Engineer, R&D Director at Andritz 

By standardizing design processes, these guidelines ensure that all touchpoints maintain a consistent brand identity. In the past, Eskola and his team at Raute have developed Raute’s Product Design Guideline in collaboration with the design agency Huld. The purpose of this guideline is to streamline and standardize the company's product design processes. Additionally, it aims to increase sales, improve product recognizability, and ensure consistent representation of the Raute brand across all customer touchpoints. 

The design process, driven by user research and market trends, starts with understanding customer needs to develop concepts that address market gaps, enhance product functionality, and fulfill those needs. Eskola states that visual design serves as a key quality indicator, directing the overall strategy while incorporating all functionalities. 

Visual design guides the overall approach, incorporating all functionalities.

– Roope Eskola, DSc Mechanical Engineer, R&D Director at Andritz

In conclusion, a Product Design Guideline serves as a cornerstone in maintaining a Unified Customer Experience, providing a framework for collaboration and standardization across departments. As emphasized by Roope Eskola, the goal is not merely to assemble individual parts of the process but to establish a comprehensive framework that ensures every touchpoint reflects the brand identity and delivers a seamless customer journey.